🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that just exercised our powers as divine creators. Writing this email counts, right? 😇

Daniel Shankin says psychedelics should only be a sliver of the healing plan. The stuff that really matters, he’d argue, is way more ordinary than you’d expect. But the ordinary, as it turns out, is infinitely beautiful. At least that’s the heart of his methodology, "fractal inquiry.”

We asked Daniel what yoga’s journey west predicts for psychedelics, how creativity and agency fuel healing, and what the psychedelic integration world keeps tiptoeing around.

Legal psilocybin services can run upwards of 3 grand.

They’re worth every penny, too, but that doesn’t change the fact that lots of people are priced out.

Sangam's group journeys, however, cost $1,000. (We'll let you do the math.)

Once a month, this licensed healing center in Lakewood, CO runs a full weekend experience. You prep on Friday evening, journey with mushrooms on Saturday, and integrate on Sunday morning.

Fly in, do the work, fly home. Heck of a weekend getaway if you ask us.

The next journey is April 18th, and the group locks in by April 4th.

I got into psychedelics in college, when I was reading a lot of Ram Dass and doing yoga. The combination of those molecules and those teachings really inspired a 'pay it forward' mindset. Once you do psychedelics, you realize that if you want to hold onto anything, not only do you need a daily practice, but you also need to actively be in service. You have to give something back. The medicine was telling me I had to help. I just didn't know how yet.

So I went into yoga teacher training, became a meditation teacher, and got trained as a somatic leadership coach. I started working with artists and small business owners, and people kept wanting to talk about their psychedelic experiences. At some point, the word “integration” showed up on my radar, and I thought, oh, I wish I’d had that. Oh, I still need that.

So I started an integration circle. I was living in Marin, in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais. Tam Integration had a nice ring to it.

The early circles were very sweet. Once a month, about ten of us would gather and just offer each other support in a simple, yet profound way. Then one day a friend asked me to host a talk about their ketamine therapy practice. We somehow jammed a hundred people in the local coffee shop. No one else was hosting these conversations back then, and people were hungry. It just kept growing from there.

The psychedelic scene is about ten years behind yoga. Both filled a gap for people who had stopped trusting a medical system that was, in a lot of ways, part of what made them sick. Yoga took the world by storm through the late nineties and into the early 2000s. Conferences, teacher trainings, and studios popped up everywhere.

Then the market got saturated, and the ethical problems followed. Sexual misconduct, financial abuse, and practitioners misrepresenting their abilities were rampant. Whenever there’s power, you’ll see power abused.

Fortunately, the psychedelic space is having these conversations more explicitly. But the risk is the same. There is a heightened state, a position of trust, and a practitioner who has convinced themselves their intentions are pure.

What yoga has that psychedelics mostly lack is the attention on the body. You are sweating and feeling your limits in your tissues, which has an important grounding effect. Psychedelics tend to be very mental. Half the time people leave their body entirely. Yet, for all the talk of somatics in the therapeutic space, it is still largely a head-centered practice. That’s worth paying attention to as the field grows.

Well, 95, 90, 85, who knows? Those are what we call hippie statistics. But the point stands. You can't do psychedelics on a daily or even weekly basis without losing your mind, so the actual time spent in altered states is always going to be small. The question is what surrounds it.

Preparation and integration sessions, where you’re unpacking the material, count. But I keep coming back to something more basic: what does it actually take to feel feelings you've decided are too painful to feel, or to see the beliefs you've been calling reality? For me, a huge part of the answer is art and ritual. Making things matters. Writing matters. Cooking matters. Anything that moves you from consumer to creator is part of the work.

I spent two years shopping for the right piece of art for a wall in my home. Then one day I was journaling about creativity and I thought, just paint it yourself. The resistance I felt before doing that, the sense that it wasn't my place to make something, was exactly the kind of limiting belief that keeps people small. Now I’ve got this awesome mural on the wall that I got to paint with my kid. Now he knows that he’s allowed to create big audacious art pieces, too!

Yoga asana works in just the same way. You show up on the mat with limitations in your tissues, your stamina, and your imagination of what's possible. Little by little, all three grow.

All of these practices also serve to increase our sense of agency. We outsource authority constantly. We hand our emotional well-being to the news. We believe, for some incomprehensible reason, that the same systems that caused our problems can somehow fix them. The work, with or without psychedelics, is learning to take back our agency, our personal responsibility.

It starts with the premise that people are infinitely beautiful and interesting. Humans aren’t a problem to be solved but an endlessly complex fractal to be explored. Our job isn't to fix them. Our job is to be curious. You ask questions you're genuinely interested in the answers to, and you keep asking, each one building on the last, until the person sees something in themselves they hadn't seen before.

The questions need to meet a few criteria. They should come from real curiosity, not a script. They should serve the client's growing awareness, not the coach's intellectual interests. They should be questions the person already knows the answer to, but they live just below the surface. The coach isn't delivering insight from outside but asking the person to look inside.

For example, let’s say you’re working with a person who can't get to work on time. A certain kind of coach would say to set an earlier alarm. But there are a million reasons someone isn't getting to work on time, and you won't know which one it is until you ask. Maybe they stay up too late because their partner naturally keeps later hours, and they're afraid of missing time together. Or maybe they picked up a morning routine in childhood that served them well in the past, but is now getting them into trouble. You don’t know until you ask. 

When you ask the right questions and create a sense of safety, people start to see the filters through which they have been running their lives.

What's missing are heartfelt conversations about God. Not religion or doctrine, but the direct experience of something larger, which a huge proportion of people who work with psychedelics report and which most of the professional conversation carefully sidesteps. In this field, nobody wants to say God, so instead you get “The Universe,” or “Source.” I understand the impulse, but you can sometimes feel the discomfort or the awkwardness when someone tries to avoid stating the obvious. I think we’d be happier if we just got over it. 

I understand that I’m lucky, I didn’t grow up with religious trauma, so I don’t have wounds around the G word. I met God on acid, and he seemed cool. He let me know that everything was unfolding according to plan, that love and wisdom and connection were available, and that I wasn't alone. It’s sad when people have those experiences and then sober up and go right back to believing they're on their own. Instead of finding ways to stay in contact with whatever they touched, they treat it as a memory, or worse, a hallucination.

There was a mural at Alex Grey's original Chapel of Sacred Mirrors that says,“love brings up anything unlike itself for the purpose of healing.” It's one of the best things I've ever read. It describes what mushrooms do, what a good coach does, and what happens when people stop running from the harder, stranger, more alive parts of their experience and let someone sit with them while they feel it. That's what integration is for.

Join his mailing list or sign up for his next integration coach training this fall.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.